This won’t be a popular diary. My last one was; lots of comments and almost twice as many recommends as comments. This time, I will probably get three times as many comments as recommends, and just a handful of those. In my previous diary I said Trump was stupid, criminal, and crazy. Over 80% of those who took the poll agreed. Then again, I expected Daily Kos readers to agree. This time, I won’t be preaching to the choir, and I expect to be criticized. Then again, there is good reason to argue with my political friends—I’m not talking with my political enemies.
It appears that the Republican morons in Congress are hell bent on shutting down the government if they don’t get their own way. Marjory Taylor Gang-greene is a major culprit. It would be fun vilifying her, or Gym Jordan, or Kevin McCarthy, or the other absurd clowns in the Republican circus. Their idiocy and blatant hypocrisy provide plenty of fodder for a juicy diary lambasting their misdeeds.
Only this time, I believe it is time to reflect about whether the Democrats’ fondness for organized labor, has allowed us to ignore the consequences the UAW strike will have. If you are from Chicago, you root for the Chicago Bears. If you are from Wisconsin, you root for the Green Bay Packers. Likewise, if you are a progressive Democrat, how can you not root for organized labor? I consider myself both a progressive Democrat and was an avid supporter of labor advocate Bernie Sanders. So why am I not gung-ho in favor of the striking auto workers?
Because this time I think they are wrong.
Before you race to comment why I am dead wrong, allow me to continue. Several years ago, working for the Marlboro County Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission in South Carolina, I discovered my boss was robbing me blind. I went to get my eyes examined and was told the expense would be covered by my county employee health insurance. Then the lady said that for some reason I never received my insurance coverage. I told her that wasn’t possible; I spent half a day filling out all the forms six months ago with an expert from the insurance company. I investigated and found out my boss, the county commission director, was pocketing the money that was supposed to go to provide me with health insurance.
The way I saw it, if the money that was supposed to pay for my health insurance was diverted to my boss, he owed me that money. I added up the amount of all the premiums he pocketed for about six months and confronted him face to face. I boldly told him he owed me the money that was supposed to pay for my health insurance—which he only pretended I had. He didn’t get upset; he merely refused to pay me anything. His attitude was, what are you going to do about it?
I contacted a lawyer that specialized in South Carolina labor law and met him at his office. Never in my life had I seen an attorney who acted more depressed. All he would do was shake his head and lament, “Workers in South Carolina have no rights at all; no rights at all.”
I never got a dime my boss stole from me.
The paradox remains that South Carolina has done well since my family moved here in 1962. My father’s company Cryovac, a packaging company which used to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts, moved to Greenville, South Carolina. Why? No unions here meant cheap labor without risk of strikes. Although the textile industry was moving overseas, many major companies moved to the Greenville area including G.E., Michelin, and especially BMW. Why? Same reason; no unions and cheap labor. Of course, in South Carolina this was euphemistically referred to as a “right-to-work” state when it more accurately a “no-right-to strike” state.
Although overall good for South Carolina’s economy, I had heard stories from friends who worked for BMW. They didn’t like it. As one friend put it, if you have a complaint, no one listens and no one cares. They don’t have to.
So, in my humble opinion, unions are good things. Without them, a company can fire anyone for any reason and perpetrate any injustice. If you don’t like it, you can leave. And good luck finding another job. It’s not right, and it’s not fair.
Yet unions can go too far, and the right to strike doesn’t mean going on strike is right. I remember visiting family in New York, where my grandparents complained how terrible things were in the city because the sanitation people went on strike, and after weeks of trash and garbage piling up, things not only stunk throughout the city, but it was creating a potential public health crisis. The government was held hostage. Either give in to unreasonable demands, or the entire city would become grossly un-sanitized.
Indeed, there are many occupations where striking workers can cripple the economy. Suppose all nurses and hospital workers went on strike. Fine, you say, they are over-worked and under-paid—until you have a medical emergency and without hospital workers you can’t get medical care. Likewise, teachers, perhaps the worst-treated professional group of workers, do no service to their students or the people in their state, if they go on an extended strike. Yet, I don’t think DeSantis would have ruined teaching in Florida if the teachers there had a strong union.
It is not a question of being pro-labor or pro-management. Both labor and management are two different sides of the same coin. To prosper, both sides need to work together, as neither side can work without the other. Personally, from what I have heard about the writers’ and actors’ strike in Hollywood, I think their strike is justified. Not because I think management is always wrong, but because most actors barely earn enough to get by, while management is exploiting them and raking in millions.
Moreover, entertainment is a luxury, not a necessity. If actors and writers go on strike, it may create hardships for the employees; it may create hardships for the employers; but it won’t have a devastating economic effect on the rest of us.
However, like many things in life, too little of something is a bad thing, but too much of the same thing is also a bad thing. It is a bad thing when individual workers are at the mercy of unscrupulous companies or corporations, and don’t even have a voice. It is also a bad thing, if unreasonable demands jeopardize not only the company, but the entire country.
The problem is, what one side considers unreasonable demands, the other side considers just compensation.
When workers went on strike against Ford in 1936, it was justified. According to CNN Business:
During the final days of 1936, about 50 autoworkers at General Motors shut down their machines at Fisher Body Plant No. 2 in Flint, Michigan, and sat down.
The workers, members of the tiny United Automobile Workers union founded just a year prior, sought to improve brutal working conditions at mighty General Motors, the world’s largest manufacturer. They also demanded GM recognize the union as workers’ bargaining agent in negotiations.
During the 1930s, UAW workers were protesting the intense speed they were forced to work on assembly lines, the arbitrary power GM foremen had to hire and fire them, and unlivable wages. GM had disrupted workers’ attempts to form a union through spying campaigns and firings of organizers.
When I ran for State office in 2020, I advocated raising teachers’ salaries 20%. Where would the money come from? Make marijuana legal in South Carolina allowing our farmers to grow it, and tax it, giving the proceeds from the tax revenue to pay for the increase in teachers’ salaries. But I also proposed teachers work two more months per year, expanding the school year from The first of August to the end of June, with a week off at Xmas and another week off in April for Spring break.
So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me for auto workers to demand a 20% increase in salary, too, especially since, “The average hourly wage for workers manufacturing motor vehicles and parts has dropped by more than 20% in the past two decades when adjusted for inflation, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
However, the UAW isn’t demanding a 20% increase in salary; their demands are closer to a 40% increase in salary. (They reduced their demand from 46% to 36% increase.) “Even United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain admits the union's demands in its ongoing strike against the Big Three automakers are ‘audacious.’”
It is a fundamental law of economics that one can’t distribute wealth without first creating it. Before one can divvy up a pie, you first have to have a pie to divvy up. This is why I proposed teachers not only get paid substantially more money, but also work more months to increase productivity. Teachers aren’t being productive if they don’t teach for three months. This means students aren’t learning as much as they should.
The problem with shutting things down, whether it’s the Federal government or Detroit, is that by shutting down production we shut down productivity. This is so obvious it should create a big “Duh!” But we tend to forget that when workers go on strike, demanding a bigger slice of the pie, the pie gets smaller. To put it another way, when auto workers are striking, fewer cars (and car parts) are produced, and fewer available cars means the cost of buying a car increases.
“The economic impact of a full-fledged 10-day strike against the Big Three could top $5 billion, the Anderson Economic Group estimated.” This doesn’t mean, ipso facto, no one should ever strike; but it does mean going on strike creates economic hardships as productivity decreases. But one thing the UAW is demanding is that the five-day work week be reduced to the four-day work week. This is nuts. It is one thing to demand much more money for doing more work, and quite another to demand much more money for doing much less work.
The question remains, how are car companies going to survive if its workers are less productive, rather than more productive? The forty-hour work week was worth fighting for. The thirty-two-hour work week isn’t worth fighting for.
There are some stark realities that must be considered anytime there is a major auto strike.
- Auto companies can move manufacturing to other countries where labor is cheaper and there is less threat of strikes.
- Auto companies can move to other states where labor is cheaper and there is less threat of strikes. (This is why BMW and Boeing are in South Carolina.)
- Customers can buy high quality cars for less money that aren’t made by GM, Ford, and Chrysler.
- Customers don’t have to buy cars as long as they can keep the one they have in repair.
- Customers can’t even keep their current cars in repair, if they can’t obtain the replacement parts they need because the workers are on strike.
Personally, I think it is wrong for an American auto company to move to another country. We need American manufacturing. But the only way to prevent auto companies from moving away from Detroit and other American cities, is to make sure auto manufacturing is profitable here. There are good reasons for the government to protect the auto industry in America and it has done so in the past. Detroit has been devastated already because auto manufacturing was transferred elsewhere.
If fishermen over-fish, their individual profits increase, but the depletion of fish can ruin the industry, and make buying fish exorbitantly expensive. If workers demand too much money and get it via striking, they may profit in the short run, only to eventually lose their jobs if the company moves away or has to shut down.
The other day I walked into a grocery store wearing my hat saying, “Greenville County Democratic Party.” The man in the meat department commended me for wearing my hat and told me he had run for office himself, and his father had been elected as a Democrat in South Carolina. I told him I ran in 2020 but didn’t think I could afford to run again. He encouraged me to run and said I should focus my campaign on one critical issue: climate change.
He was right. Catastrophic climate change is the most critical issue of our time—and growing more critical every year. Yet the question remains. Can America become a leader in producing electric cars? Can the Big Three of Detroit compete with Tesla, owned by a mad man who has deplorable politics?
It depends. The US government and Detroit must work together to convert from gas-guzzling environmentally hazardous vehicles to electric ones. This means Detroit may need to shut down plants building infernal combustion engines to electric ones. This will be expensive, although not doing so will only prove to be devastatingly more expensive. Yet the UAW is demanding the right to strike if a plant you are working on is shut down in order to open up another electric car plant:
The union wants a guaranteed right to strike over plant closures and some form of compensation in the event of a shutdown of the plant…
However, the companies argue they need to have the flexibility to shut down or move operations. They've already pointed to the high cost of EV transition to explain painful cuts,…citing the high cost of the EV transition.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not for The Big Three management and against the workers. Although moving to EV is essential both for the US economy and to try to keep the planet capable of sustaining human life; they need to work out a plan both to close down obsolete plants without fear of strikes, and at the same time, make sure the workers at those plants are not forsaken.
One day, when teaching at Spartanburg Methodist College, I overheard a lecture by the Economics professor who I had befriended. What I heard shocked me. The professor was telling his students that management of companies had no obligation to do anything for workers. He said, workers were a commodity that should be paid the least amount of money to do the job. The concept that workers were human beings with lives and families, who deserved a decent income and a job with dignity, was ignored.
So my heart is with the workers. However, my head wonders if going too far by striking will bring about the law of unexpected and unwanted consequences. I also strongly suspect that much of the auto workers’ animus isn’t because they are treated so poorly, but because they are being compensated unfairly. As Bernie Sanders pointed out over and over, the rich are getting richer and richer, and everyone else is barely getting by. It is this huge discrepancy between the highest salaries and the lowest that makes everyone (except CEO’s) so angry.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra, the highest-paid chief executive among the Big Three, made nearly $29 million in 2022. Securities and Exchange Commission filings show that this is 362 times the median GM employee's paycheck.
Compare this with salaries in the military. Top generals make about $210,000 a year, enlisted privates make about $21,000 per years (plus multiple benefits.) This means the highest five- star general only makes about ten times the salary of enlisted men and women. When your employer makes 362 times more money than you do, it makes you so angry (as it should) that you want to go on strike (which you probably shouldn’t).
What needs to be done is to drastically reduce CEO pay, and drastically increase their taxes, such as before Reagan initiated his trickle-down catastrophe of gutting the progressive tax rate in America. Tax cuts are a scam perpetrated by Republicans to convince most Americans they are saving money, when actually the cost of depleted services means that they are losing money. Tax cuts, such as the one Mitch McConnell forced through Congress using the moron in the White House to go along with, only benefit the ultra-rich, not middle-class Americans.
Next, we need to establish universal health care—Medicare for all. Many years ago, I was reading an article in Forbes. The author made the case that a lack of universal health care in America meant American car companies had a disadvantage competing with car companies in countries where there was universal health care. Ford, GM and Chrysler had to pay for the medical insurance of their employees, whereas other car companies didn’t have to as the government paid for those benefits. As Bernie Sanders said over and over, although universal health care costs a little more in taxes, the average American will save thousands of dollars a year in the long run. What has prevented the adoption of universal health care is the rich, who don’t need it, pay politicians to prevent it. A man with an umbrella doesn’t care about anyone caught in a downpour who doesn’t have an umbrella.
If the government (meaning taxpayers) provided universal health care, then the Big Three would have more ability to complete with foreign car companies. They would have more money for salaries and could charge less for each car.
I heard my political hero, Bernie Sanders, praise the UAW for striking against corporate greed. My knee-jerk reaction is to agree with anything Bernie says and align myself with other progressive pro-labor Democrats.
However, when I find myself becoming infuriated that the Republicans will probably shut down the government if they don’t get their way, which will only hurt everyone (including the Republicans.) I wonder how wise it is to support the UAW strike which is shutting down Detroit and can also hurt all Americans.
I had planned to buy an electric vehicle this year. I fear the current strike will only make buying a new car more expensive. Electric cars are already so expensive, many who want them can’t afford to get them. If this strike prevents Ford, GM, and Chrysler from being able to produce enough affordable electric cars that this country and the entire world needs; then regardless of who benefits most from the strike in the short run, all of us will suffer in the long run as catastrophic climate change continues unabated, because too few people switch to electric vehicles.